Zoodles redux; a partial success

August 10, 2015

For my second try on the spiralizer, I stayed with zucchini noodles and changed the sauce and the protein.

I can report that zoodles do not play well with white wine sauce. However, lobster plays with it VERY well.

I’d happened upon lobster tails at Sam’s a while back, at 20 bucks a pound, which is a good price, so I bought a couple and chunked them in the freezer. They were about 10-ouncers — big healthy things.

My Memphis guinea pig was visiting, and I was casting about for something different to do for dinner. Can’t waste a good guinea pig on everyday stuff, y’know. I thought about those lobster tails, and I thought about how I used to love the Coquille St. Jacques at Paulette’s, a collection of several different kinds of seafood cloaked in a white wine sauce and then wrapped in a crepe, with more white wine sauce over the top.

And I thought about doing that with lobster, over some kind of veggie noodles. I settled on a repeat of the zucchini.

Initially, I’d contemplated yellow squash noodles. Those, or perhaps potato noodles, would have been better. Something about the flavor of the zucchini just didn’t work well with the white wine sauce. Or perhaps I should have cooked them a bit more than al dente.

Anyway. The sauce and the lobster were most excellent.

A white wine sauce, at least the way I make it, is a classic Mornay sauce with the addition of — guess what — white wine. For years, I thought Mornay sauce was synonymous with white wine sauce; it isn’t, as a basic Mornay has no wine at all. But it’s easy to make, and well worth the time and effort.

First, you make a blond roux with about four tablespoons of butter and 3 tablespoons of flour. Cook that over medium heat in a saucepan until it starts smelling nutty, but hasn’t begun to brown. Whisk in 1/2 cup dry white wine. Once that’s reduced a bit, add 1/2 cup heavy cream and whisk all that together. Then add about a cup, maybe a cup and a half, of whole milk. Keep heating that until it starts to thicken, and then stir in a cup of grated Gruyere cheese. Set it aside off the heat when it’s as thick as you want.

There is, I think, no better sauce for shellfish than this. Well, except for homemade cocktail sauce with shrimp. But for a hot seafood dish, this is it.

The lobster tails, I just boiled, 12 or 15 minutes, because I boiled them straight from the freezer. Perfect. Plated the zoodles, topped them with sauce, plunked lobster meat on top. Not half bad. Better, as noted, over something else. Or just in a casserole by itself.

We had watermelon and tomato salad, with feta and cucumber, with it. I used my standard honey balsamic citrus dressing, which I keep in the fridge and which I blogged here a few weeks back, on it. Good, but I’d just about as soon have just had watermelon by itself, or the tomato and feta with cucumber and olives. Don’t see the point in messing up watermelon with anything else, unless you’re putting it in a cocktail.

But lobster? In white wine sauce? Yeah, I can go with that. You ‘n y’mama ‘n ’em try it sometime.